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Amar Bose : A Researcher, Educator and the Founder of Bose Corporation

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There will be rarely any person who is not aware of Bose Corporation. Bose has been a leading brand in the field of audio equipment development for past more than 50 years. The company was never founded to earn profits, but to provide better user experience for the consumers. And the man behind this revolutionary company was Amar Bose. Almost sixty years ago, Amar Bose became dissatisfied of the sound quality of an expensive and high tech speaker of that time. And today, his dissatisfaction had led to one of the best audio equipment manufacturers in the world, Bose Corporation.

Early Life

Amar Bose was born on 2 November 1929 as Amar Gopal Bose, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Noni Gopal Bose, was a Bengali Hindu, and his mother, Charlotte, belonged to a French-German decent. Noni Gopal Bose was an Indian freedom fighter, and Charlotte was a school teacher.

While growing up, Bose developed an interest in electronics and during World War II, started a small business of repairing model trains and home radios, at the age of 13. He completed his high school education from Abington Senior High School in Abington, Pennsylvania.

Amar Bose
Image Source: patch.com

After receiving a high school degree, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he first pursued a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, and later, completed a PhD from the same institute in Electrical Engineering. The topic for his PhD thesis was non-linear systems.

Bose had become quite active in researches starting from the time of his graduation and even spent a year in Eindhoven, the Netherlands for the research work at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium. In the following year, he spent another year in Delhi, India as a Fulbright research student.

Career

After completing his bachelor’s, he got the opportunity to work at MIT, as an assistant professor. While working at MIT, in 1956, he bought an expensive high-end speaker but was disappointed with the performance. Despite having great technology of that time, the speakers could not retain the live audio experience. This, later, became the inspiration for his future business venture.

Acoustics became the prime research subject for Bose, and he started working towards achieving that live experience of a concert hall, for the high-end speakers.

Founding Bose Corporation

After extensive research on the speakers, in 1964, Bose was ready to start his own company. He pitched to the angel capitalists for the funding. He also took the help of his PhD thesis guide professor, Y. W. Lee. The loudspeaker model that the company produced was the model 2201, designed to set up in the corner of a room, reflecting the sound from the walls of the room.

The next research program that the company carried out focused on the dominance of the reflected sound arriving at the head of the listener, to provide the listeners with the live audio experience.

In 1968, the company launched its first commercially successful loudspeakers, Model 901. The model was such a huge success that the company produced it for almost 50 years, and discontinued it only in 2017. This loudspeaker is the longest running product of the company.

In the past more than fifty years, the company has been researching in the field of psychoacoustics and has been improving on its product quality. In fact, “Better Sound Through Research”, is the official slogan of the company, which was a statement given by Bose in an interview.

Bose continued working at MIT, even after founding Bose corporation, as he wanted to support the research work for Bose Corporation. He retired from MIT in 2001. Bose has been one of the best professors at MIT. In fact, many of his students have credited him for helping them in gaining life skills and problem-solving skills. He was awarded the Baker Teaching Award in 1964. For his contribution in the field of electronics and to the development of MIT, MIT established the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching (1989), and the Junior Bose Award (1995) to honour him.

Bose has got two patents in the field of loudspeaker design and non-linear, two-state modulated, Class-D power processing. In 1994, he received an honorary doctorate in Music from Berklee College of Music. In 2008, his name was registered at the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In 2007, Bose was listed at number 271 in the Forbes list of richest persons Forbes 400. In 2011, his recorded net worth was $1.0 billion. Bose donated the majority of company shares (non-voting) to MIT, to continue the research work for Bose Corporation.

Bose will be remembered for his outstanding contributions to consumer electronics, his great teachings, and for his leadership qualities.

Tony Fadell : The Co-founder of Nest Labs, Who Revolutionalised the Ugly Thermostats

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iPod has been one of the most innovative products from Apple, and it was not just Steve Jobs that brought out this innovative product, but another brilliant mind that worked behind it was Tony Fadell. Tony Fadell is one of some rare innovators who has contributed to many major development projects in major companies, like Apple and Philips. Tony Fadell is also the founder of Nest Labs, a company that builds smart home products, especially the thermostats.

Early Life

Tony Fadell was born on 22 March 1969, as Anthony Michael Tony Fadell. His father is a Lebanese, and his mother belongs to Polish ethnicity. He completed his high school education from Grosse Pointe South High School, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. In 1991, he received a graduate degree in Science from the University of Michigan. He was still in college when he worked as the CEO of Constructive Instruments.

Career

After completing his graduation, Fadell got the opportunity to work with Apple, on Apple’s spinoff General Magic project, where he worked for three years, first as a diagnostics engineer, and then as a systems architect. During this time, he contributed to some major Magic Cap projects including the Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy.

Tony Fadell
Image Source: telegraph

In 1995, he joined Philips and became the CEO and the Director of Engineering of the Mobile Computing Group, after he co-founded it along with Philips. While in Philips, he played the major role in the development of a few Windows CE-based hand-held services.

Later in 1999, he got inspired to found his own company, named Fuse, that sold the small hard disk-based music players. The company failed to put an impact on the investors and got shut within a year of its inception.

In February 2001, Fadell joined Apple Inc., as a contractor designer and was employed to work on Apple’s new project, iPod. Within two months of his joining at Apple Inc., he was appointed to assemble and run its iPod & Special Projects group, and in 2006, he became the Senior Vice President of the iPod Division. He played a significant role in the designing and development of the iPod and is also referred to as ‘one of the fathers of the iPod’. In 2008, Fadell left Apple.

Founding Nest Labs

In late 2009, Fadell was busy building a green home for himself, where he was looking for alternates for everything that could help save energy. Here he found out that the thermostats are really helpful in saving and controlling over 50 to 60 per cent of money on the energy consumption every year, but people are unaware of how to do that with those ugly looking thermostat.

So finally, he conceived the idea of launching a thermostat that could automatically help people save more energy. Being known as one of 0the fathers of iPod, many raised questions on his decision of building thermostats and even tried to stop him, including Fadell’s wife. In the very beginning, even the co-founder of Nest Labs, Matt Rogers, doubted his plan, but Fadell was convinced that his decision could bring some revolutionary changes.

Matt Rogers was one of the iPod development team members. In 2010, the two founded Nest Labs and released new revolutionalised and awesome looking thermostats, enabled with wi-fi that worked using sensors and machine learning. The Nest Labs thermostats were able to adapt the user behaviour and work accordingly.

Even though thermostats had been there for many years, Fadell found out that there had been no alteration in those thermostats, not even in its design. So when he built the new smart thermostats, even Google became interested in investing in the company. Shasta Ventures and KPCB became the first investors in the company, and on 13 January 2014, Google revealed that it was planning to acquire Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash and on the very next day the tech giant acquired Nest Labs.

Fadell worked with Google and Nest Labs till 2016 and resigned from Nest Labs on June 3, 2016.

Fadell is one of the greatest inventors and engineers who has contributed to many famous and innovative developments. He has also received several awards and recognitions, including Alva Award for ‘The Next Great Serial Inventor’ in 2012 and was named among the ‘CNBC Top 50 Disruptors’ in 2013. He was also listed among the ‘Trailblazers: 11 people changing the business’ by Fortune in 2013, ‘The World’s Top 25 Eco-Innovators’ by Fortune in 2014 and in the list of ‘100 Most Influential People in the World’ by TIME Magazine in 2014. He has also authored over 300 patents in his 20 years long career.

Cheng Wei : The Founder of China’s Biggest Transport Network DiDi Dache

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China has been the home for many startups and innovators including Jack Ma, the founder of the biggest eCommerce giant Alibaba Group, and Lei Jun, the founder of Xiomi. Another tech innovator who hails from China is Cheng Wei, the founder of China’s biggest autonomous technology conglomerate, DiDi. Wei is one of the fastest grown CEO in China and is often counted among the top three most successful CEOs in China.

Cheng Wei was born on 19 May 1983, in the southeastern province of Jiangxi, in Shangrao, China. He completed a graduate degree in administration from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology, and after graduating, joined as the assistant of the head at a foot massage company. Soon he realized that this is not the job he always intended to do, and after working for a period of one year at the company applied for the job of a salesperson for the business-to-business e-commerce service at Alibaba.

Cheng Wei
Image Source: fortune

Joining Alibaba proved to be a good decision for Wei, and in the span of six years, he was promoted to various positions in the company. He became the sales manager for the north of China. After six years he was appointed as the deputy general manager at the online payment department, Alipay, in Alibaba, becoming the youngest regional manager in the company.

In 2012, Wei left Alibaba to found his own company Beijing Orange Technology Co, and the first service that he started under the name of the company was DiDi Dache, a transportation service, with an initial capital of worth 15 million dollars from the tech giant Tencent. This car-rental service was a result of his experience with the cabs, as he had missed many flights due to as he could not catch the cabs on time.

People could use the service through an app and get an immediate pickup. The app also included a feature that allowed the users to book the cabs for the next day.

In 2013, the company completed its Series B funding, followed by a series C funding in 2014. In the same year, DiDi Dache appointed the ex-Goldman Sachs Asia managing director, Jean Liu (Liu Qing), as the as COO of the company.

In February 2015, DiDi Dache merged with the other major mobile-based transportation network Kuaidi Dache, making DiDi Kuaidi, keeping the management separate. In July 2015, the company had fundraising, which made it the world’s first private company having completed the largest single fundraising round and raised a worth of US$2 billion.

The company provides hiring service for cars, bus, minibus, chauffeur service, car rental service, bike-sharing service and has got over 10,000 employees working for the company. In 2013, Uber entered China, but DiDi maintained the strongest hold on the transportation market in China. In September 2015, Didi Kuaidi rebranded itself as Didi Chuxing

According to Wei, Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing, and his company is working on the very technology to bring new ideas and technology to DiDi. In 2017, the company started expanding in the other parts of the world starting from Brazil. Also, the company has invested in the other car-rental services like Grab, Lyft, Ola, Uber, 99, Taxify and Careem. The company currently is serving 550 million users across over 400 cities.

Wei is known as a Nationalist and many times has been heard of addressing China’s history and military in his speeches at big conferences. In September 2015, he got the chance to join China’s leader Xi Jinping, to visit the U.S. and attend the 8th U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum (USCIIF) and become the youngest person to participate in the forum.

The employees of his company see him as the greatest leader who is confident and knows how to deal with every situation. Despite the big rivalry between Tencent and Alibaba, he has been able to maintain a calm relationship between the two investors of his company.

In 2015, he was named in the list of “40 under 40” for the Chinese Business Leaders by Fortune. And in the same year, he was at number 1 in the list of China’s “40 under 40” along with Jean Liu. In 2016, he was named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year. In 2017, Time listed him among the 20 Most Influential People in Tech and was named one of the Global Game Changers by Forbes. In 2018 Forbes China named him among the 50 Most influential business leaders in China.

David Welch : A Pioneer in the Field of Optical Devices & the Co-founder of Infinera

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Passion can not only help you discover new horizons, but it also leads you to the heights of success. In the past many years, we have been hearing about the discoveries that have been derived from passion, and today, are contributing to the world. One such passionate person is David Welch, an optical engineer, who is the pioneer in the field of optical devices and the co-founder of Infinera. David Welch started his journey as an optical engineer and ended up becoming an entrepreneur, who is also one of the famous contributors in the various sectors of science, engineering and technology.

Early Life

David Welch was born on 26 October 1960, in Washington, D.C. His father was in the navy and had also worked as an engineer at Westinghouse. David was inspired by his father and used to build small electronic equipment with him. He also built an electronic tic-tac-toe game for his science project while in school.

David Welch
Image Source: globenewswire.com

David completed his high school education from Severna Park High School in Severna Park, Maryland, and attended the University of Delaware where he pursued a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. During the freshman year in college, he played as the pitcher in his college baseball team. At the same time, he had applied for the naval academy to follow his father’s footsteps in career, but soon he realized that he is not much interested in navy. During his vacations, he used to take small jobs at companies that helped him to get involved in practical engineering works. One of his such jobs included a job at Aeronautical Radio, Inc. where he worked on radio technologies used in planes.

Later, in 1985, he joined Cornell University to earn a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering.

Career

As soon as David finished his PhD thesis, in 1984, he started giving interviews and finally, joined as the research scientist at SDL, in January 1985. Eventually, in the late 80’s he was appointed as the vice president of research in the company. In 1992, for his contribution to the optical science, David was awarded the Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America. Throughout his seventeen years of career, he handled various important job titles at SDL including the chief technology officer and vice president for corporate development.

At the same time, he designed and developed the high power diffraction limited semiconductor lasers and was awarded the IEEE LEOS Engineering Achievement Award in 1998. Then in 1999, David received the OSA’s Joseph Fraunhofer and Robert M. Burley Award.

Founding Infinera

David met his future co-founders Jagdeep Singh and Drew Perkins at a 2000 Christmas party. The three had discussions on optics and bandwidths. Together they conceived the idea of starting a digital optical network and started working on the same.

In the year 2000, David founded Infinera as Zepton Networks, along with Jagdeep Singh and Drew Perkins. The company stayed underground until it produced its first product in 2004. The company is known for the production of WDM optical transmission equipment for the telecommunications service provider market. The company is also a pioneer in the design and manufacture of large scale photonic integrated circuits.

Within seven years of its inception, in 2007, Infinera went public on the NASDAQ raising a valuation worth $182 million. This was just the beginning, till now the company has registered over 300 patents in the field of optical transport and virtualization of optical bandwidth. Welch himself holds over 130 patents in the field of optics and has published over 250 articles on the same.

Personal Life

Welch married to Heidi Welch in 1993. The two have a daughter and two sons. Welch is one of the boards of directors of AntriaBio, Inc., which is a biopharmaceutical company. As of 2018, the estimated Net Worth of David F Welch is at least $11.5 Million.

Wang Xing : Chinese Billionaire Businessman & the Founder of Meituan

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A geek and a curious guy, this is how the Chinese people know, Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan, the biggest Chinese group buying website. Wang Xing is a serial entrepreneur who emerged as one of the successful businessmen in China, even after facing multiple failures and now, he has built the biggest online-to-offline market in China. Also known as ‘Big Brother Xing’, he has been giving its rival, Alibaba’s Ele.me, a tough competition.

Wang Xing was born on 18 February 1979, in Longyan, to a Chinese businessman Wang Miao, the owner of a cement factory located in the city of Longyan in Fujian. Wang Xing completed a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from Tsinghua University in 2001.

wang xing
Image Source: fortune.com

Having born into a business family, Xing was always into starting up his own business. Inspired by the success of Facebook in the U.S., he dropped out of the University of Delaware, where he was pursuing a PhD in computer engineering and started his first social network named Duoduoyou. The startup specifically targetted the students in the various university, but like many of other startups, it was unable to make the mark.

The second time, he started Youzitu, that was built to serve the Chinese students abroad. But again the startup got shut down. The next startup that Xing started was Xiaonei that he launched in 2005. This startup also targetted the Chinese students and was the first of his startups, to get thousands of registered users in a small time.

But yet again, Xing faced problems like financial issues in handling the company and had to sell it to InterActive Corp, for US$2 million, only after a year of its inception. InterActive Corp renamed the company to Renren, that later raised US$740 million, in its IPO in 2011.

Having earned enough money in the deal, Xing was able to perceive a new startup idea and launch another social media app, which actually was a micro-blogging app inspired by Twitter, named Fanfou. This time, the startup went very well and had gained over 2 million user base. But then, in 2009, Government ordered to shut down the social network as a result of violent discussions that took place over the platform about the Ürümqi riots. But eventually, after a small time gap, Xing re-opened Fanfou and is still an active participant on this platform.

Even having faced many failures in his past start-ups, Xing never became discouraged and pushed his limits even further. In 2010, he came up with his another startup, Meituan, a group buying a website for local food delivery services, consumer products and retail services. Xing received the initial funding of worth $12 million for the startup from Sequoia Capitals. This startup again was inspired by another US-based company named Groupon and sold discount vouchers on various services and deals.

The company is backed by Tencent and is one of the biggest on-demand services providing platforms. By the year 2014, the company had employed over 5,000 people, and in 2015, it had registered over 200 million users. The company operates in 2800 cities in China and has partnered with 400,000 local Chinese businesses.

On 8 October 2015, Meituan merged with a Chinese group buying site named Dianping, and the merger became Meituan Dianping. In January 2016, the company raised $3.3 billion worth of funding. Meituan Dianping went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2018 at a price HK$69 per share.

Wang Xing has always stressed on enhancing the efficiency and in fact, has done the same in the past fifteen years. Currently, he serves Meituan Dianping as the chairman and is also the member of the board at Beijing Mobike Technology Co Ltd. He is an avid reader and also writes blogs on topics like entrepreneurship, philosophy, etc.

In 2018, Xing was at number 37 in the Forbes China Rich List 2018 and at number 379 in the Forbes Billionaires 2019 with an estimated worth $4.1 billion. He was also listed number three on the Forbes 2018 “40 under 40” list.

Rick Alden : The Visionary Genius & the Founder of Skullcandy

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A disruptive thinker and wildly unpredictable, the two terms can be associated with Rick Alden, the founder of Skullcandy, the American headphones manufacturing company. Alden is also known as a mad genius, who always believed in refinement and innovation. He wanted to create a product that was not owned by the user, but it could own the user.

Alden was born on 4 July 1964 in Baltimore, Maryland. Rick loved snowboarding and wanted to pursue a career in the same. He attended the University of Colorado Boulder, and while in college, he founded his first company National Snowboard Inc (NSI), along with co-founder Jim Gardner, in 1986. The company was an event management firm that hosted the consumer and pro-snowboarding events nationwide.

rick alden
Image Source: kcpw.org

Later, he moved the headquarter of NSI to Denver and migrated to the University of Colorado Denver, where he pursued a Bachelor’s degree in political science.

The next business venture that Rick founded was Device Manufacturing, which he founded along with the veteran snowboarder Brett Conrad and produced the step-in snowboard boot and binding system.

In the late 90s, the snowboarding was becoming more popular, and Rick himself was an active snowboarder. Rick liked to listen to music at high bass while snowboarding and knew that others also loved to do the same. But the chunky headphones never provided him with the experience he always expected for. This led Rick to think about a new business idea, i.e. a company that would produce headphones, especially for snowboarders and skateboarders.

In 2003, Rick founded Skullcandy and started manufacturing headphones for snowboarders. Skullcandy launched its first product, the Skullcandy Portable LINK Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2003.

After the launch, he went out to market all the Skullcandy products directly to the snowboarding and skateboarding shops. In the beginning, pitching to those shop owners was not that easy, but slowly they got convinced and started selling the headphones at their shops. In fact, Rick offered those owners to buy back the headphones himself, if they did not find any customer for them. But the innovative product never brought such a situation and received much appreciation from its consumers.

In the following years, Rick pitched the idea of putting the speakers into the helmets to Giro, one of the most popular snowboards and ski helmets producers. The company liked the idea. Rick also convinced Giro to print the tag line “Powered by Skullcandy” on the packaging.

In 2007, Rick approached Best Buy, Target, and Circuit City to get picked for the Q4. All the three companies were impressed by him and placed immediate orders with Skullcandy. Rick never expected to get picked by all the three and did not have enough expertise to complete the orders within time. But then, he decided to visit China to figure out better ways to increase the company’s tooling cavities, and the plan worked. Rick completed the orders within the given time, and it was the biggest turning point for Skullcandy.

In 2008, the company rolled out all its products in all the retail stores. Bored of old chunky headphones, Rick manufactured more colourful and designer headphones and earbuds for Skullcandy consumers.

In the December edition of Forbes magazine, the Skullcandy earbuds were introduced as “the world’s coolest ear bud”. In 2011, the company acquired another headphones manufacturing company, Astro Studios. In the same year, the company filed for its first IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In 2016, Skullcandy was acquired by Mill Road Capital for $196.9 million at $6.35 per share.

Rick Alden has been issued the patents for inventing technology to integrates mobile phones and music players, known as LINK, and designing the Orvis Batternkill Large Arbor Fly Fishing Reel.

The Inc Magazine ranked Alden at number 31 in the Inc 5000 Award for Skullcandy’s three-year (2004–2007) growth. He was also named “Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2009.